Network Streamers
It seems that everybody is in the network streaming business. What these devices involve is a single motherboard with a small variety of chips, an ethernet connector, perhaps wi-fi cable plus or minus a DAC and a couple of RCA connectors. Take the lid off and what do you have? An empty box. This invariably has nothing in common with the price. You can pay anything from $240 to $5000 for a network streaming device. However, if you look at what is in the box, you could probably build one for $50. That high end chip in your DAC – it costs about $20. Have a look at what hifi’s network streamer review list: what have these devices got in common? They all seem to be ugly flat boxes with either no display or some microscopic screen on the front the size of the old iPod nano.
There are 3 types of media streamers. The first type is the “invisible” one, characterized by the Sonos system. I have lived with this for several years, and love it. Sonos constructs a music library for you by scanning your network drive and displays albums with thumbnail album art on a superb hand held remote control. Unfortunately that costs $350. Thankfully, Sonos solved this problem by allowing users control their system with iPod, iPhone, iPad and android apps. Now it seems that every manufacturer has taken the lazy approach and used this interface.
The second type is the rack mount hifi component streamer designed to match the rest of your hi-fi. These all look crap, and many use crappy DNLA connections to grab data from your network drive. Call me a Luddite if you like – but most of us don’t have network drives, don’t want network drives and find them a pain in the ass: why can’t you connect an external USB disc to the back of the machine? Or, better still – sell a matching drive enclosure into which you can place a couple of off the shelf SATA drives (mirrored of course), that you have filled with music from your PC. Or, more simply, just make the network device, the storage device and the ripping device the same: hence RIP-NAS. Another approach is to build a modern “music center” like the Naim Uniti Lite – which would be great if it had a decent color screen. How much more money would it cost to include a little pop up 4-5 inch screen like in dash dvd players (see image). That way – you can have your screen and hide it!
The third type of player – typified at different ends of the spectrum by the Squeezebox touch and the Meridian Sooloos (digital media system). The latter is 20-30 times the price of the former. I cannot imagine that any red blooded male audiophile or music lover would not want to have a Sooloos system. It is cool pure and simple. Yes we all like the remote control iPad thing – but c’mon the control system and software is outstanding. Would I buy it – no way. Look at the picture to the left: this screen looked amazing 3 or 4 years ago. Now – it looks really dated compared with the latest 8000 series Samsung TVs. The whole Sooloos system costs $8000 to $10,000. For that money you can buy some serious high end hi-fi that will last decades: in 5 years time the Sooloos will be old tech that you cannot give away (think of 20 year old Meridian CD players). Most everybody agrees that Sooloss is the best media player with the best software. But very few people can afford to buy it. And, if you have invested in an expensive DAC, why would you want to duplicate hardware.
Right now, music software players on computers are poor – and some, such as iTunes, fiddle with the audio settings so that bit perfect resolution is not delivered. There is nothing worth buying on the Mac (mostly iTunes extenders that allow for proper 24 bit output – such as pure music); on the PC there is J River Media Center – which is pretty decent – but I find quite flakey – it cannot handle my massive digital library as well as Sonos. I would happily fork over $200 to buy the Sooloos software – even if it meant using a computer exclusively to play audio content. Now that windows 8 is out, with a decent touch screen interface, laptops with detachable screens – surely a clever computer company will build a proper entertainment PC decked out with a high end sound card , a solid state hard drive and Sooloos like software, and blow all of this overpriced kit out of the water. Until then, Meridian can keep their expensive system and I will make do with Sonos for 16 bit and Squeezebox for 24 bit – music, into my Benchmark DAC giving me similar sound quality and experience for a fraction of the price.
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